Expectation

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 The word expectation have just eleven letters but it's meaning is much bigger than the size of our brain. Every person have different views and ideas about expectations, and not only humans even animals, birds, insects also keep expectation.

“Why do expectations hurt”, this is like one of the most common lines in movies, usually the romantic ones. “Jack…it’s my fault(lady Sobbing), I was expecting a lot from you…I should have known earlier that you didn’t love me(Cries profusely)”. 

Okay, this could easily happen to any of us in our actual life, in fact, it happens “a lot”. I’m not talking about you crying over some dude called “JACK”, but about expectations hurting us.We can classify expectations into 2 forms, the first one is more of a personal one, these are the expectations that we place on ourselves, an easier example of it could be as simple as someone setting a personal goal. And the second involves expectations that we place on others, it could be your friends, lovers, parents, etc.

To be honest, even I used to be so dumb. I never used to face the reality and just started expecting and atlast I just got disappointments .

But now it's too much, I'm not gonna tolerate such disappointments anymore therefore whenever  I start expecting I quietly acknowledge what I’m feeling and remind myself: "Expectations are premeditated resentments".

What can we do about it

So now that we know how expectations can affect us and make us feel bad about life, the real question remains to be “ What can we do about it going forward?”.

By now it is clear that for us humans it is tempting to live in a fantasy world of our own making. This fantasy exists in the form of expectations, there are 2 types of expectations :

1. Things you expect from yourself.
2. Things you expect from others.

“Don’t eliminate expectations, learn to balance them against reality”

Balancing Self Expectations

It’s important to understand that when your self-expectations let you down it’s because, either your expectations far exceeded the reality, that it was just impossible at the moment to bridge the gap between the two. Or your own “behaviors” and I put this in double quotes to emphasize the fact that it’s your behavior which is at fault and not you as an individual, the behavior is something which can be changed to get the desired outcome. So it’s completely useless to beat yourself up with self-destructive statements like “I’m a failure”, “I’m not good, I can never do this”, “I don’t know what I was thinking”, “I can’t take this” etc, etc.

Balancing expectations placed on other people

The need for reciprocity is deeply embedded in our nature. This is actually a serious one and right now in this very moment you might have certain expectations from your closed ones, and chances are that you are secretly hoping these to be met. I mean why not? But what if they don’t behave the way you would want them to? Does that mean they don’t love you or care for you anymore? If yes? How sure are you about that? Have you ever considered the fact that they might actually have no idea about your thoughts? So, the best way to deal with such feelings is to communicate with the person you have expectations from and hope that they have the humility to understand what you expect of them and why it means a lot to you. If they really do care about you, then they’ll communicate back and there is a good chance that you’ll have a better understanding of why they did not behave the way you wanted them to behave. The next thing you do is to start negotiating with that person until you both arrive at a solution that works.

The other day I was reading a book which actually talked something on the lines of why having expectations from others can affect your mental health and the author says that it’s an undeniable fact that human relationships including marriages are rarely spontaneously reciprocal. Here the author is talking about people who do something good to others and expect them to do good in return and if they don’t reciprocate back, they get upset and depressed. And the reason he says why these human relationships are not spontaneously reciprocal is because of the fact that human beings are different. This problem can only be solved with continued effort, which involves mutual consensus, communication, compromise, and growth. It requires negotiation and hard work.